Please note: You don’t have to one of the most recognized fashion brands in the world (like Marc Jacobs is) to make this work for your brand. For example let’s say you run an athletic clothing store and offer free yoga classes at several of your store fronts – this would be a great actionable movement to brand and spread across their channels. Use the inspirational aspect of getting fit, New Year’s resolutions, healthy living, or whichever angle you believe your customers would gravitate towards. Test out a few hashtags, find the one that resonates best, and brand your movement by announcing it on your blog and social channels.

Priit is the founder and CEO of DreamGrow Digital, an internet marketing and social media company. With his 20+ years internet marketing experience he is Helping companies to understand and use the digital marketing to reach their target audiences. He's also writing on a personal growth website Fixwillpower.com. He has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences on different aspects of internet marketing. Priit is also the organizer of Digital Elite Camp, a leading traffic and conversion event.

Planned content begins with the creative/marketing team generating their ideas, once they have completed their ideas they send them off for approval. There is two general ways of doing so. The first is where each sector approves the plan one after another, editor, brand, followed by the legal team (Brito, 2013). Sectors may differ depending on the size and philosophy of the business. The second is where each sector is given 24 hours (or such designated time) to sign off or disapprove. If no action is given within the 24-hour period the original plan is implemented. Planned content is often noticeable to customers and is un-original or lacks excitement but is also a safer option to avoid unnecessary backlash from the public.[92] Both routes for planned content are time consuming as in the above; the first way to approval takes 72 hours to be approved. Although the second route can be significantly shorter it also holds more risk particularly in the legal department.
As a product of the Mark Zuckerberg generation, it is easy to understand why people are so obsessed with social media; for marketers, the potential to grow their business via these networks is endless. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ – these are some of the prime networks every company, big or small, young or established, needs to have an active presence on. It is now inexcusable for any business that wants to thrive to not be tweeting!
Last but not least, the reason that is most likely to lead to ROI: increased inbound traffic. Without social media, your leads are limited to people who are familiar with your brand and people who find you by searching ranked keywords. By increasing your social media content frequency and expanding your social media channel presence, you are adding another path back to your site. And as a result, you’ll receive higher traffic, as well as more conversions.
Your social media strategy is your plan of attack. But in a space like this that literally changes by the day, with surprise newsfeed algorithm updates, new channels, and audiences always ready for something new, you need to remain flexible and keep your finger on the pulse of the internet to constantly improve without getting distracted by every new shiny object.
Use Buzzsumo to find content that resonates. I just started using this tool recently, but I’ve already added it to my bookmark bar and am completely addicted. It’s the easiest way to search related industry news sites and blogs, keywords, influencers, etc. to find the content with the highest number of social shares. Study the headlines that were shared and re-share those articles/headlines with your followers. This will continue the train of sharing, but also show your followers that your social posts are intriguing and follow-worthy
We already know from Larry that posts with emojis receive more attention. Similarly, when examining our tactics with images, we found that photos will generally receive more attention. This was further affirmed by Convince&Convert, who report that posts with pictures generate 150% more retweets. At WordStream, we analyzed posts on Twitter and Facebook and found that the most retweeted or liked posts featured images of real people--#PPCkid and images of our employees worked fairly well, but even memes featuring a real human work as well.
Engagement: Social media has now grown to match its meaning. The business has to keep a social relationship with its clients or audience and engage them if the strategy is to work. It is no longer just posting information on the social media and leaving it like that. The user has to keep in touch with their followers and audience to make them want to keep visiting the page and viewing what new things the business have for them.

HootSuite is the most popular social media management tool for people and businesses to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks like Facebook and Twitter from one web-based dashboard. Hootsuite has become an essential tool for managing social media, tracking conversations and measuring campaign results via the web or mobile devices. Hootsuite offers a free, pro and enterprise solution for managing unlimited social profiles, enhanced analytics, advanced message scheduling, Google Analytics and Facebook insights integration.

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you're not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you're missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

And although the study didn’t go into a great amount of detail on which types of photos did best, an underlying theme was that images of people and faces tended to garner more +1’s (admiration) while images of pets, food, and even memes enjoyed more shares. Finally, images that featured positivity in some aspect – including quotes, inspiration or good things happening in the world also tended to be popular among the Google+ using crowd.
When you first sign up for this management tool, it can seem a bit overwhelming. There are tabs and instructions everywhere. You’re given insight right away into certain statistics you don’t usually get with other tools. However, Sprout Social is different from the rest, because it focuses on the idea that communication and engagement between businesses and customers should be better and more open.
In addition, social media platforms have become extremely aware of their users and collect information about their viewers to connect with them in various ways. Social-networking website Facebook Inc. is quietly working on a new advertising system that would let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves.[109] This may be an unethical or ethical feature to some individuals. Some people may react negatively because they believe it is an invasion of privacy. On the other hand, some individuals may enjoy this feature because their social network recognizes their interests and sends them particular advertisements pertaining to those interests. Consumers like to network with people who have interests and desires that are similar to their own.[110] Individuals who agree to have their social media profile public, should be aware that advertisers have the ability to take information that interests them to be able to send them information and advertisements to boost their sales. Managers invest in social media to foster relationships and interact with customers.[111] This is an ethical way for managers to send messages about their advertisements and products to their consumers.
Achievement in almost any area of your life will be dependent upon other people. In this case, it’s your future customers and your current customers. Actively cultivating and curating your brand’s online presence is the investment required to achieve an effective social media marketing strategy. Our full services social media marketing company can help you give your all to your investment through our social media management and social media advertising services. We’d be happy to talk to you and see which avenue is best for your business.
Let’s be honest. How many times have you logged in on Facebook to schedule posts on your business page only to find yourself lost in the sea of posts after 30 minutes? And suddenly, you realise you haven’t retweeted something you were meaning to. You rush to Twitter and the same story repeats. A dashboard will save you ton of time. Because on its own, each social media platform can be a time-suck. With a dashboard, you are keeping things in perspective.
We are humans, so mistakes are unavoidable. This is especially true when it comes to the fast-paced world of social media. Rather than flat out ignoring these hiccups, embrace them. I am not saying that when a comma is missed in a tweet you should announce this small grammar error, but DO NOT delete the tweet. It has already been published, and followers are more likely to notice if you are continuously re-posting. For larger mistakes, like a product error or multiple overcharges to customer credit cards, you’ll want to proactively respond in an apologetic, actionable manner, and send out content from your social accounts apologizing and addressing how the error is being handled so customers are aware.
To convert and monetize a social audience, your business needs a tool that can turn all of this data into a concrete strategy, with easily understandable reporting and visualizations. The tool needs to do this while also monitoring the full scope of your social audience on all of the networks or platforms they live. Many of the enterprise analytics tools don't offer built-in publishing and some of the SMB-focused offerings don't have quite the depth of analytics. Because of this, be sure to pick a social media analytics tool that's affordable for your business and easy to use—and one that offers third-party integrations or an application programming interface (API) should you need to hook it into other software.
Another interesting tool I would like to introduce to you is the Blog2Social plugin. It has powerful options for easily sharing your posts across all popular social media networks in one easy step. You can optionally customize your posts for each network and automatically schedule your posts for the best times to share. The plugin is a big time saver for cross-promoting.

I won’t pretend to be an expert in analytics, but I appreciate the vast number of metrics available. Luckily, there are experts out there, like the fine people analyzing tweets at Buffer, Twitter themselves, and Kissmetrics, who are kind enough to give us a beginner’s guide to Facebook insights. Personally, I tend to watch post engagement (based on audience size) and URL clicks when managing social media because our goals are to expand and engage our followers while driving them to the site.

Facebook Pages Manager is a platform offered by Facebook and is built with page management tools. The page management tools enables users create pages on Facebook business platform while getting discovered, building connections and gaining more loyal customers. Facebook Pages Manager simply sets up pages for your business making it easy for you to see and quickly respond to messages and comments from your customers. The page management feature enables plus the page insights feature enables users see which posts posted by them are getting people interested, therefore helping users create more effective and relevant posts in the future. The…

SocialOomph helps you re-post content on Facebook and Twitter on an automated schedule. It’s one of the most powerful social media management tools on the market, but its interface is a little clunky and old-school. If all you are looking for is a time-saving tool to repost content for you, then Oomph is worth a look. But if you want something more extensive that is easy to use, and encompasses your entire social strategy, than I’d recommend looking elsewhere.
thank you very much for this great list and sharing all this information about the different tools. I also think that there are differences between the tools, especially when it comes to usability and different options for optimizing social media management. In my eyes that is one reason why you should always consider the choice of tools for a blog as a whole.
SocialBro helps businesses learn how to better target and engage with their audience on Twitter. It provides tools to browse your community and identify key influencers, determine when the best time to tweet is, track engagement and analyze your competitors. Socialbro analyzes the timelines of your followers to generate a report showing you when the optimal time to tweet is that would reach the maximum amount of followers for more retweets and replies.

Customize your posts, schedule them for publishing later, collaborate with other team members and get access to all your social analytics. A free account gets you a very limited offering of just the basic features with tight restrictions, but there are four more premium account types that are affordable for any small or large social marketing strategy.

And now we are being exposed to more and more social advertisements. As I complete my morning ritual of sipping coffee and scrolling through my Instagram feed, I now notice sponsored ads appearing in between filtered pictures of scenery and food. It is impossible to visit one’s Facebook news feed without popping into a few compelling ads along the way. And I’m not going to lie, I’ve fallen victim to several of these ads, and been captured and clicked through to their site, sometimes even converting – shameful, I know.

Yes, I’ve mentioned Buffer in the past, and that’s because it really is a great, easy-to-use tool. Keeping up with sharing your content each day can be hard, and Buffer allows you to schedule multiple posts on different channels at once. This way, you can knock out a good amount of social distribution in one sitting, which is helpful for busy social media teams (and the thought leaders whose content is being shared).
We all hear and read the wonders that the technology does for businesses, but what does social media management software do? This tool offers a multitude of benefits to any enterprise who wants to use social media as a marketing tool. One of these is its ability to manage huge volumes of data from mobile apps and devices. Users can use such information to appraise and manage customer social media activities, allowing them to improve their marketing processes. This trend has led many to believe that this capability will spur further growth in the SMMS market.
This tool can help your team track brand mentions and social interactions. Through a single search of your company’s name, your team can discern how often others are mentioning the name, whether it’s on the receiving end of positive or negative feedback, the reach of its posts, and more. Plus, it shows the top keywords and hashtags involving your company.

MavSocial is a simple and affordable social media management platform used by thousands of marketers, businesses, and agencies to streamline their social media activities. The platform enables marketers to curate and store content, schedule and automate posts, engage with audiences, listen to industry trends, monitor analytics, build reports and collaborate with team members. MavSocial currently supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr and WeChat. Features include: - Content Management: Upload, store and manage all forms of content with AI-powered tagging - UGC Curation: Curate and obtain permissions for user-generated content - License Content: Access millions of free stock images - Campaign Planner: Create and track social media campaigns across multiple networks and see an overview with calendar view - Engage: Respond to comments and messages across all social networks - Listen: Monitor keywords, analyse trends and engage with specific topics - Reporting: Analyze performance by content, post, network or campaign - Advertising: Promote and boost your Facebook posts to your target audience - Teams & Brands: Organize workflows, assign tasks and set permissions for all social media activities by brands, teams, and users.

What type of messaging? If we’re trying to generate clicks, then our message would be something simple like, “See the highest-quality heavy machinery you’ve seen in your life” or something like that. The appeal would likely be to the quality of our machines (because our audience probably cares more about that then price) and our CTA is to see our machines by clicking.
Use the data you gather via social listening to analyze how your customers and prospects feel and what they need from your business. Your goal should be to make sure you have confidence in the data you are looking at, so you’ll need a comprehensive and extendable social analytics effort to ensure you can keep up with the latest demands. Once you understand the data, you have the opportunity to share the findings broadly across the business. We call this “operationalizing the data.”

We tested the core tasks critical to each platform's social media management and analytics features, with SMB and enterprise business value in mind. Such core tasks include how each tool gathers listening and mention data from the main social networks and other sources, and how creatively and effectively each tool transforms and presents the data with reporting and visualizations. We also tested how each tool configures and sends alerts, connects social data to tangible ROI, and does both competitive and community analysis on top of offering an intuitive home base for social publishing and content curation.

Last but not least, the reason that is most likely to lead to ROI: increased inbound traffic. Without social media, your leads are limited to people who are familiar with your brand and people who find you by searching ranked keywords. By increasing your social media content frequency and expanding your social media channel presence, you are adding another path back to your site. And as a result, you’ll receive higher traffic, as well as more conversions.

One of the main purposes of employing social media in marketing is as a communications tool that makes the companies accessible to those interested in their product and makes them visible to those who have no knowledge of their products.[33] These companies use social media to create buzz, and learn from and target customers. It's the only form of marketing that can finger consumers at each and every stage of the consumer decision journey.[34] Marketing through social media has other benefits as well. Of the top 10 factors that correlate with a strong Google organic search, seven are social media dependent. This means that if brands are less or non-active on social media, they tend to show up less on Google searches.[35] While platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ have a larger number of monthly users, the visual media sharing based mobile platforms, however, garner a higher interaction rate in comparison and have registered the fastest growth and have changed the ways in which consumers engage with brand content. Instagram has an interaction rate of 1.46% with an average of 130 million users monthly as opposed to Twitter which has a .03% interaction rate with an average of 210 million monthly users.[35] Unlike traditional media that are often cost-prohibitive to many companies, a social media strategy does not require astronomical budgeting.[36]
YouTube is another popular avenue; advertisements are done in a way to suit the target audience. The type of language used in the commercials and the ideas used to promote the product reflect the audience's style and taste. Also, the ads on this platform are usually in sync with the content of the video requested, this is another advantage YouTube brings for advertisers. Certain ads are presented with certain videos since the content is relevant. Promotional opportunities such as sponsoring a video is also possible on YouTube, "for example, a user who searches for a YouTube video on dog training may be presented with a sponsored video from a dog toy company in results along with other videos."[67] YouTube also enable publishers to earn money through its YouTube Partner Program. Companies can pay YouTube for a special "channel" which promotes the companies products or services.
The Audiense platform combines rich social data sources with world-leading cognitive and machine learning. Audiense builds and dynamically maintains insights right down to the most granular individual level. Easily identify and understand audiences that matter most by using; insights from demographics, behaviours, personalities, affinities, content, influencers, brands, competitors and more. Automatically build segments and create profile recommendations to activate target audiences on social, digital and offline channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and email, delivering highly relevant and personalised media We have two different products: Audiense Connect: Smart Social Marketing for Twitter and Instagram https://audiense.com/products/audiense-connect/ Audiense Insights: Powerful intelligence to identify and understand audiences, inform your strategies and take action https://audiense.com/products/audiense-insights/
Xsopo is an easy to use interface that enables easy use of social media. Xsopo facilitates automatic publishing and scheduling of posts on multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and many more. Xsopo makes use of the API’s of the social media websites that enables users type a message once and a quick review of how the user’s message will look like will be showcased to the user. Xsopo is also ideal for companies and enterprises as it enables them to schedule a message which will later be delivered with precision and accuracy. Xsopo features the…
Friends+Me is another prime player in the social media management tools family. While Friends+Me puts the highest emphasis on Google Plus features, many other social platforms are supported. Friends+Me appears to get rave reviews from users, and has a beautifully designed website with plans available based on the size of your business. And yes, there is a free plan!

BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.

Platform integration: The social media management software will help the business to manage all of its essential social media platforms, from one central point. The software allows for the integration of various platforms like Facebook, Twitter YouTube, Instagram and many others from a single dashboard. It means then that a business will be up to date with all the latest news and trends in the social media, making it easy for them to make informed decisions.
Socialbakers is the first AI-powered social media marketing suite for brands and agencies of all sizes. We empower our clients with the largest dataset in the industry and advanced tools for easy and successful top of the funnel marketing: Audiences & Personas Get closer to your customers by having AI define your personas for you. Discover their interests, behaviors, and affinities to understand their world. Content Intelligence Create content that gets people talking by analyzing engagement across social. From content creation to execution - work smarter and faster. Social Media Management Use AI to optimize how you manage social media. Find the right influencers and work across teams in one place to measure, schedule, publish, and evaluate your results. Social Media Monitoring Organize millions of conversations on social media to spot trends and tap into topics that matter to your audiences. Community Management Retain audiences with a social media customer care platform that scales as you grow. Make team collaboration easier to deliver timely responses to your community. Wherever you are on your social media journey, we will help you understand your audience, create engaging content, grow your customer base, and measure the impact of social media on your business.
TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. TweetDeck interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. It was the most popular Twitter application with a 23% market share as of June 2009, following only the official Twitter website with 45.7% share for posting new status updates.